Jewish History: Israel
Ira Jan
Ira Jan, a painter and writer, was the first Hebrew artist in pre-State Palestine. Born in Kishinev, Jan graduated from the Moscow Art Academy and traveled Europe before immigrating to Palestine in 1908. Known for her love affair with Chaim Nachman Bialik, she immigrated to Jerusalem in 1908, engaging in painting and teaching and publishing her stories in a number of periodicals in Palestine.
Jewish Migrations to the United States in the Late Twentieth Century
Roza Shoshana Joffe
Roza Shoshana Joffe was a teacher who made Aliyah from the Ukraine, determined to establish a school for girls in Palestine. After many years teaching in Jaffa, she left the city for a village near the Sea of Galilee, where she bought and operated her own farm and hoped to open a school for farmers’ daughters.
Senta Josephthal
Senta Josephthal was German-born Zionist activist who was particularly influential in the kibbutz movement. She trained and recruited young Germans to the movement and represented the kibbutz movement in national organizations and political arenas after emigrating to Palestine.
Juedischer Frauenbund (The League of Jewish Women)
Founded in 1904, The League of Jewish Women pursued secular German feminist goals while maintaining a strong sense of Jewish identity. The League supported vulnerable women through practical social reforms while fighting for political power within the German Jewish community. It saw employment opportunities as essential to women’s economic, psychological, and emotional independence.
Gurit Kadman
Rachel Kagan (Cohen)
Helena Kagan
Helena Kagan, a pioneer of pediatric medicine in pre-State Palestine, is known to this day as the children’s doctor of Jerusalem, the city where she settled following her aliyah in 1914. Kagan tended to generations of children—Jews, Muslims, and Christians—saving many of them from sickness and death.
Miriam Kainy
Miriam Kainy, Israel’s first established woman playwright, won the Israel Prime Minister’s Literary Prize in 1997. All sixteen of her plays were written in Hebrew and produced by Israel’s established theater companies. Kainy has also written manuscripts for radio and television and adapted dramas from English and Yiddish into Hebrew.
Anna Kaplan
Anna Kaplan was an American Jewish nurse who contributed significantly to developing the concept of nursing as a profession in Erez Israel at the beginning of the twentieth century. She was a leader in founding the nursing school, which later became the Henrietta Szold-Hadassah School of Nursing at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
Rose Kaplan
Yehudit Karp
Miriam Katin
Miriam Katin is an award-winning comics artist best known for her Holocaust memoir We Are On Our Own. She was born in Hungary and now lives in New York City with her husband, Geoffrey Katin, a music educator.
Rahel Katznelson
Shulamith Katznelson
Shulamith Katznelson helped make Israel a home for a wider range of people as both a pioneer of Hebrew-immersion programs and an advocate for Israeli-Palestinian dialogue.
Shula Keshet
Shula Keshet is an Israeli Mizrahi feminist activist, an artist, and a curator. Her activism strives for justice for underprivileged women and men in Israel; as a Mizrahi feminist artist and curator, she has created several exhibitions.
Kibbutz
Although the kibbutz was intended as an equalitarian, democratic utopia, attempts to achieve gender equality have been limited by traditional masculinities and male-controlled spheres and gender inequalities have persisted.
Kibbutz Ha-Dati Movement (1929-1948)
Beginning in 1929, the religious kibbutz (Kibbutz Ha-Dati) movement represented the confluence of progressive ideals of equality and collectivism and traditional customs of Judaism. As a result, women in the movement lived at a crossroads.
Kindergartens in Palestine: First and Second Aliyah (1882-1914)
Hebrew-language education of the youngest Jewish residents of Palestine was considered key to the continued success of the Zionist movement. The women who taught in these kindergartens, established during the First and Second Aliyah, demonstrated their dedication to the movement and became essential to its success.
Margot Klausner
Margot Klausner was co-founder and president of Israel’s major film and television studio and co-manager of the Habima Theater. She was an author, film producer, founder of the Israeli Parapsychology Society, publisher of the monthly magazine Mysterious Worlds: A Journal of Parapsychology, and a popular public speaker on theater, film, and the occult in Israel.
Bronia Klibanski
Bronia (Bronka) Klibanski was one of the heroic Kashariyot (couriers) of the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. She became the primary kasharit for the Dror Zionist group in 1943, obtaining critical weapons for the Bialystok ghetto revolt, gathering intelligence, rescuing other Jews, and saving the secret archive of the ghetto.
Reizia Cohen Klingberg
Reizia Cohen Klingberg began her career as a teacher, but when she began hearing reports of deportations and disappearances, she returned to occupied Krakow in 1942 and joined the ghetto’s underground movement. The group stole and smuggled weapons and attacked German officers. Despite being betrayed, arrested, and deported, Klingberg survived to be liberated by American soldiers at Auschwitz and subsequently moved to Palestine.
Chajka Klinger
Chajka Klinger, a member of Ha-Shomer ha-Za’ir, was active in the resistance against the Nazis in Bedzin and Warsaw. Her mission was to live, so that she could keep the flame and memory of resistance alive. Her diaries were the first written evidence about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising to escape Nazi Europe.
Lia Koenig
Lia Koenig is known as the First Lady of Israeli Yiddish Theater for her complex roles in world drama. After immigrating to Israel from Poland in 1961 with her husband Zevi Stolper, she began her legendary career at the Habimah theater. Koenig was awarded the Israel Prize, the Israel Theater Prize, and the EMET Prize.
Malka Kolodny
Malka Fisz Kolodny served as one of the first teachers in pre-State Palestine. She taught subjects ranging from basic literacy to chemistry and biology and encouraged, counselled, and supported her students, staying in touch with them for years.